Those Who Are Not Here

Drasha for Second day of Pesach

Ohev Shalom – The National Synagogue

Daniel E. Troy

April 19, 2006

(prepared text – actual delivery may differ)

      I want to speak about what this parsha has to say to and about those who are not here. We just finished reading shir Ha-yam, the Song of the Sea, celebrating Hashem’s delivery of the Jews from the hands of the Egyptians. In fact, there is a tradition that only a surviving remnant was at the Red Sea. We read at the beginning of the parsha: ”But G-d led about the people by the way of the wilderness by the Red Sea and the children of Israel went up out of the land of Egypt.” The descriptor that’s used is “chamushim.” The conventional translation of that is “well armed.” But Rashi points to an alternative explanation in the Mechilta which says that “one out of five went up, and four fifths had died in Egypt during the three days of darkness.” 

      This is actually the most conservative reading of the Mechilta, which suggests that chamushim may mean one in 50, or even one in 500. Shmot Rabba explains: “There were sinners among the Jews who had Egyptian patrons, and they had wealth and honor there, and so they didn’t want to leave.” It is unclear what happened to this reluctant majority, but let’s say that one strong possibility is that they stayed in Egypt and disappeared through assimilation. 

      The experience of 3200 years ago is being repeated today. Rabbi Riskin has a wonderful and terrifying drash about the 4 sons. He analogizes the 4 sons to the 4 generations of American Jewry. The oldest, the wise son, represent the immigrants. They are learned in the law, as we lawyers say. They are comfortable with tradition. 

      Their children – the second generation, represented by the rasha -- are still knowledgeable, but often hostile. They wanted to fit in, to be Americans. Judaism was for their parents, but despite themselves, they often led very Jewish lives. 

      The next generation – essentially my generation – represented by the tam, knows only how to ask: what is this? 

      Our children’s generation, the sh aino yodayah lishol, says Riskin, is so ignorant that it does not even know how to ask a question. 

      And the generation of our children’s children – they are not even present at the seder table, they are absent, not there. 

      This drash is chilling because it rings so true. Let me share some statistics from the 2003 Greater Washington Jewish Community Study, conducted by the Director of the Jewish Demography Project, a professor at the University of Miami and backed by a major Jewish foundation. Ours is the sixth largest Jewish community in the country, with 215,000 Jews living in 110,000 Jewish households. We are increasing by an average of 3630 households every year. 

      So much for the good news. Of those households, only 44 percent are on the Jewish Federation mailing list – the lowest of about 20 comparison Jewish communities. Thirty-seven percent of Jews say that they belong to a synagogue. But only 26 percent actually do, well below average among comparison Jewish communities. Among such communities, Washington has the second lowest percentage of Jewish households who have a mezuzah on the front door -- only a bit more than half (55 %). We have a well above average percentage of married couples in Jewish households who are intermarried – 41 percent. More than half of married couples in households under age 35 are intermarried (53%). More than half of the children in intermarried households are not being raised Jewish (41%), or are being raised both Jewish and another religion (14 percent). We have a lower rate of Jewish households who report current membership in a Jewish organization like Hadassah or Bnai Brith – one in 5 – than 35 other comparison Jewish communities.

      Interestingly, and disturbingly, Jewish households over age 65 show low levels of involvement compared both to other age groups in Washington and in other Jewish communities. As a broader Jewish community, we are sorely in need of role models. 

      Perhaps most seriously, we are not educating our young. The 44 percent of Jewish children 0-5 enrolled in Jewish preschool program is well below the average of 25 comparative communities, and down 7 percent over the last 20 or so years. Of Jewish children 5-12 enrolled in a private school, only half are in a Jewish day school, well below average for about 20 comparative Jewish communities – and affordability is not the main reason parents are not sending their children to Jewish day school. 

      Perhaps most amazingly, the percentage of Orthodox in our area is 2 percent. There are more Reconstructionist Jews in our area than Orthodox Jews. It is obvious, for the overwhelming majority of Jews in this area, they or their children or their children’s children will soon be absent from shule, from the seder table, from Jewish life generally. 

      What accounts for this? A primary culprit, of course, is very thing we cherish most about America – its tolerance and openness. As Irving Kristol has said, “in America, Christians don’t want to kill Jews, they want to marry them.” But I think that we as a community are partially responsible. Because we have forsaken the balance Judaism carefully promotes. Speaking metaphorically, we have over-emphasized the experience in Egypt, the loss of the 80 percent or more, and we have not focused enough on the joy associated with the Exodus. 

      What did bnai Yisrael do when they escaped from the Egyptians. I am sure that their hearts were aching with the loss of 80 percent of their community, and they were terrified by the unknown challenges that lay ahead of wandering through the desert with neither food, nor water. But they sang! They danced! They expressed, in a profoundly human way, their joy at being alive, at having a relationship with Hashem, and in being part of the Jewish people. 

      But rarely will you hear the message from the establishment, institutional Jewish community about the joys of being Jewish. Compare how often you get a mailing urging you to do a mitzva – other than giving money – with how often you get a mailing proclaiming that anti-Semitism is afoot and\or raising the specter of the Holocaust. (I am not referring to mailings from the shule.) 

      Why is this? I suggest it is because the establishment Jewish community is besotted with anti-Semitism. Conversely, most American Jewish leaders (rabbis aside) are extremely uncomfortable urging anyone to lead a traditional Jewish life. If you don’t think that this is true, compare the amount of money the Jewish community spends on Holocaust memorials and museums with the amount spent on day schools. 

      Cheryl and I were in Tampa a few years ago. While looking for things to do, we noticed that one of the city’s “attractions” was, it bragged, the fourth largest Holocaust museum in the country. Really, does every city in America need a Holocaust museum? Building monuments and museums is not the only way to honor the memories of those who died al kidush ha’shem. We also honor them by perpetuating the Jewish people as a living force. Pharoh built great cities as well; yet he is remembered primarily for his failures in the realm of human interactions – his refusal to let the Jews go. 

      Many of you may have seen or heard of the survey a few years ago of the Jewish community asking which was the biggest problem facing the American Jewish community – anti-Semitism or intermarriage. To my amazement, fewer than 40 percent said intermarriage, instead more than 60 percent named anti-Semitism. The percentage of those identifying anti-Semitism as the primary problem matched almost exactly the percentage of Jews who said that their family included someone who had intermarried. The denial and cognitive dissonance on this issue is not only remarkable, it is extremely dangerous.

      So, what are we here today to do? After all, we are not the ones who are absent – we’re here in an Orthodox shule, we are observant or on a path to becoming so or becoming more so. 

      A few years ago, I heard a sermon by Rabbi Tzvi Marx of the Hartman Institute, who comes every year to lead the alternative services on the High Holidays at Ohr Kodesh. The crisis in what was called “Jewish continuity” was all the rage, and various institutional responses were being debated, such as sponsored trips to Israel – which I am not denigrating by the way. To Rabbi Marx, it was all nonsense. He had one recipe. Show your children that being Jewish is a joy, he said. Emphasize the good, the fun, the relevant. Don’t view Jewish history as a vale of tears. In this day and age, few want to play the victim, and proudly proclaim their membership in a group that trumpets its suffering. 

      Rather, he said, we must emphasize our triumphs over adversity rather than the adversity itself. In that regard, I would like to add, certain Jewish holidays, particularly Pesach, are perfect. You know the saying about Jewish holidays: they fit a pattern – they tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat. What could be a more uplifting message?

      To be clear, I do not suggest for a moment that we can or should forget those who were left behind in Egypt; the 10 lost tribes; Hannah and her sons; the deaths of Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Hanina ben Teradyon which we read about in the martyrology on Yom Kippur; the Jews in Nordhausen, Germany in 1348, who willingly submitted to be burned rather than convert; or, chas v’shalom, the 6 million. But, as Rabbi Marx said in another sermon he gave, it is hard to figure out what to do on a practical level with the Holocaust. It is simply too big, too horrible to understand. If we cannot essentially accept, Job-like, that we are incapable of comprehending it and go on by trying to revitalize Judaism, then we have little choice but to surrender to despair. 

      In that vein, it may be worth mentioning that the parsha we read today – B’shalach – was read the week the Auschwitz was liberated, on January 27, 1945. One writer has suggested that perhaps B’shalach coincided with the liberation of Auschwitz to remind us that the liberation of Auschwitz, even if much too late, was also a miracle in its own way.

      In any event, as the surviving remnant, just as those who survived Mitzrayim and the Red Sea, we must revitalize Judaism through joy. I gave a variation of this talk many years ago. Going to back to it, I was delighted to see how perfectly it coincides with what I take to be the philosophy of this shule and of Rabbi Herzfeld. Rabbi Herzfeld hears the depressing statistics about the Washington area I cited before and instead of surrendering to despair, thinks – marketing opportunity! As he once said, it is not enough for this congregation to focus on our own spiritual, religious, and other needs. Rather, we must look outside of our immediate community. Almost everything he does is infused with a spirit of kiruv by sharing the joy of being Jewish. 

      In addition to supporting those institutional efforts, we as individuals can and should all do our best to share with other Jews the joys of living a committed traditional Jewish life. For example, almost all of us have a shabbat dinner; I suggest that we think more often about inviting non-observant Jewish friends to share that experience with us. We can offer to take them to shule with us, or recommend Jewish books. The Jewish injunction is against prosletyzing non-Jews, not other Jews. 

      Of course, just the very word “prosletyzing” sounds so fundamentalist, so judgmental. I am not suggesting a hard-sell, if only because I don’t think that works. I’m also not suggesting that we wrestle random Jews on the street into mitzva mobiles to force them to lay t’fillin. But I bet that each of us has at least one Jewish friend who we think could be more observant. Their parents may have been, or they simply may have manifested some interest in our traditional Jewish practices. 

      Members of this congregation can be terrific ambassadors for traditional Judaism. We can show our friends and acquaintances that modernity and traditional Judaism are not necessarily incompatible; that the mitzvot are not just the province of those who wear black hats and coats. We can invite them into our homes and share with them the meaning and joy that Judaism brings to our lives. 

      Who knows, our singing and dancing to Hashem – not just among ourselves, but with others as well -- might even bring the fifth son back to the seder table.